Purple Never Fades
by SpookyGlue
Summary: Roman emperors used to wear Tyrian purple, specifically made to be resistant to fade. Ironic. The Joker, Gotham city's most infamous Tyrant meets a woman on the run. She's more like him than he ever thought possible.
1. Chapter 1

**Hey guys, this is my first try at this on this sight. Hopefully everyone loves it! I would love to see some reviews and comments on how you like the first chapter so far! I'm excited to be able to write for everyone.**

 **Don't worry, J will appear in chapter two. I just wanted to give a very clear image of what our _leading lady_ has been through up until now. **

Chapter One: Welcome Home

Roman emperors used to wear Tyrian purple, specifically made to be resistant to fade. At that time, it was worth more than its weight in gold. Someone once told me that ten thousand crushed shells would amount to one ounce of the "royal purple" dye. It was rare, expensive, and challenging to make, and that's why it historically became exclusive to royals.

Funny, that's one of the only things I recall from History class. A meaningless fact about the color purple. Four years of world history. I slept that time away, but for good reason. Though, now it seems like destiny. It seems like everything that I've done throughout my entire life has been meticulously planned by a higher being. My mother used to say that everything ahs a meaning, and everything happens for a reason. Part of me wishes she was wrong, and a lot of me is thankful that she was right.

THREE AND A HALF YEARS AGO

Everything came back to me like a tsunami. I felt attacked by my emotions. I couldn't quite gather my thoughts, and I couldn't remember what happened or where I was. The nausea hit me, and I could feel the red hot tingle that morphine left in the back of my throat. My hands and body were heavy, and I felt like I cheated death. I finally pried my eyes open through sheer will, and was instantly overwhelmed by the whiteness. It was bright and reminded me of a flash of lightning after your eyes already acclimated to the dark. An instant migraine set in, and I got a halo of blurriness around the edge of my vision. I didn't see her come in, but I sure heard her.

"My BABY! Are you OKAY? I've been SO WORRIED about you!"She comes in hot, waving her arms around like she's on a roller-coaster. Her eyes dart around to see if there are any nurses in the room, and she cools off her "perfect grandma" persona and quickly loses her smile and forcefully plops down, as if her act is exhausting. I stared at her blankly and wondered if she was really this desperate for attention, or if I was still groggy from the heavy pain meds. Just then a nurse knocks at the door and she goes from nervous to-

"Thank WONDERFUL JESUS you're OKAY! I was so worried about you! We got you flowers and candy!" I look around and there are three vases full of flowers, and a red solo cup full wild flowers. I took a wild guess which one was from her.

"We?"

"Well…your friends had some things delivered." Delivered. So they didn't stop by. In the trashcan beside the guest chair, there were gourmet chocolate boxes stacked five high. I gave her a look and she tries to avoid my gaze.

"Wonder where all the chocolate went." I said flatly. I wasn't mad, I'm not a sweets person. But it's kind of salty for her to take things addressed to me while I'm laying here unconscious.

"Well, I didn't think you'd be eating them any time soon." She says it with a feigned guilty smile on her wrinkled face. The look on her face says she feels bad, but her track record says otherwise. She will take and take to benefit her and then pretend she's sorry when she's caught or confronted. She's scheming.

"That's fine, who were they from?" I ask and she glances down.

"Did…you throw away the cards?" I get a glimpse of her light blue eyes for a second, and she nods her head before she speaks.

"I think one of them was from your friend…" She trailed off.

"So…you opened my cards?" I stared her in the face, something that I usually avoided. As I dared to look her in the eyes she gave me a defiant smile. Her eyes flashed and she cocked her head with a plotting gaze.

"Well, your _doctor_ says you need to be monitored. So I took the liberty of opening all your mail at home, too." She stared at me with a look that said "test me".

My "doctor". She means my Psychiatrist. She hated that word, probably because she knew she needed one. Perhaps afraid that if she accidentally said it three times one would appear to ask her "how do you feel about that" and smother her in medications that make you a zombie. Like they were doing to me. I lifted my arm to try to get a class of water, but the aching in my wrist stopped me. I felt like I was made of glass. As if at any moment, with one wrong move, I would shatter. I checked the gauze on my wrists, and it appeared as though I had re-opened the stitches.

The cuts were deep, and I had made them intentionally. I wanted to die. _Corinna_ made my life hell. Her ever-changing personality made me nauseous. She saw me struggling to get a drink, and before I could push the nurse button she brought a glass of water to my face and bent the straw. I eyed her before drinking. She wouldn't dare put anything in my water at the hospital. She's have to be…crazy.

"There's nothing but water in there dammit! Drink it! Wouldn't want the nurses to think I was _abusing_ you, would we? Can't let you dehydrate." The smug look on her face made me want to hit her. I couldn't remember a time that she wasn't abusing me. Since the day I turned fourteen she's been torturing me and manipulating situations to ensure I was caught in her vice. She wanted to control me. She, for some reason, wanted to keep me around. Perhaps it was because in her sick, twisted mind she needed someone to torture, someone to take out all of her anger on.

I was never a happy child. I would always complain to my mother that everything hurt. Not physically, and it didn't take her long to understand what I meant. Nothing was fair in this world and it hurt. Your success was determined by how much old money you were born into, and new money depended upon how hot you were or how many men you slept with to get to the top.

Gotham city. The place of billionaires and mobsters. Where infamy is equal to fame. Such a diverse population divided into two categories. Good and bad. The home of the Batman. The playground of the Joker. The force of good, and the curse of evil. My mother moved here before I was born, because everything made sense to her. Karma got people. There was justice. The good ole days of Gotham where you were punished for your crimes and rewarded for your good deeds. That's not the Gotham I live in today. I life in a city of havoc, chaos, and a ceaseless fight between good and evil.

But actually, that's the way I like it.

Welcome to Gotham.

. . .

I was released from the hospital the next day. My grandmother drove us back to the run-down two bedroom apartment. I threw my backpack onto the old couch and made a B-line to my room.

"NOT so fast." I knew it was coming. What was supposed to be a wake-up call ended up being another reason for me to be punished. She sprinkled rice down in the corner near the door. The sight of rice made my stomach turn. I already had almost a hundred white dashes of scar tissue sprinkling my knees. She uttered the words that made me want to disappear.

"Kneel." I hesitated, and in an instant she appeared next to me and took a fistful of my hair. "KNEEL little girl or I will make this SO much worse." The blue in her eyes faded to a smoldering grey and I did as she told. As I knelt down, the all too familiar sensation of the rice cutting into my knees swept through my body as blood trickled over the floor. There was much more blood than usual. Only I noticed.

"YOU EMBARRASSED me! Is this not good enough for you?" She grabbed me by the hair once again and slammed my hair into the wall. "I hav _e_ give _n_ yo _u_ EVERYTHING!" She annunciates the end of every word by slamming my head repeatedly into the wall. My nose is flowing blood, and it won't stop. She bends down to take a closer look at my face. The smell of her breath nauseates me. I try to put my hands up in defense but my wrists feel like they're going to detach from my arms.

"Don't you EVER try that SHIT again, you hear me, you PIECE. Of. SHIT?" She ends the sentence with spitting in my face. I wipe my face with the lower part of my white t-shirt and she gets closer, her voice shaking with fury. "You're going to make people think I'm CRAZY. Trying to kill yourself?" She scoffs, as if it were the dumbest thing she's ever heard. "Your life here isn't that bad. Believe me, I've given people a lot worse to live with." That was a threat, and I knew it.

Two hours later, I was finally allowed to get up. Mt knees locked and I was dizzy from all the blood loss. The linoleum was stained brown. She eyed me as she handed me tweezers and a bowl of bleach with a sponge. After I dug all of the rice out of my knee, I was expected to scrub the floor and rid it of all the blood stains. Upon getting the floor as clean as I possibly could, I crawled into my bed and wept until early morning.

"I just want my mom back" I whispered to myself in the dark.

Ah, home sweet home.


	2. Chapter 2: Runaway

**Hey guys! I'm pumping out chapters faster than I want to upload them. But fear not, You can expect at least three a week. I don't own anything, Just Sybil and the story line. THANKS and do me a solid and review please!**

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I woke up late that morning, and without a word paced to the shower in the hallway. As I was taking off my clothes I felt the soreness in my knees awaken. My knees were swollen half way up my thigh and were decorated with swirls of _green and purple_. I started the shower on the hottest setting and stepped in. The warmth on my feet felt like I was reborn. Slowly, I stepped into the water. My wrists ached as I realized they were still wrapped from the hospital the day prior. I slowly peeled them off to see what the damage was underneath. Bright red marks intertwined with eight black stitches on either side. The hotness of the water seeped into them, but the pain felt good. I winced at the thought of pain bringing me joy. I felt guilty, but I also felt like doing it again. Maybe a little cut, just enough to draw blood. Enough to feel the endorphins course through my body and give me that euphoric high I so badly craved. I searched for something to use. My shaving cream sat in the usual spot with my razor. But this time my razor wasn't there. I shrugged it off and finished my shower, disappointed but thinking it was for the best. They might haul me off to Arkham if I started cutting not even twenty-four hours after I got out of the hospital.

My room looked different when I came back in to get dressed. The sheets to my bed were completely gone, and all that was left was the thick white down comforter my mom bought before I was born.

 _Maybe she's doing laundry._ I thought. Perhaps, but not likely. She always made me do all the chores around the apartment. My closet was dismal as usual. Mostly black and tan clothes occasionally paired with the few scarves and belts-

…that were missing.

I finished putting on my clothes and settled on black leggings, a white t-shirt, and a hoodie. Rushing into the living room, I immediately spotted Corinna and waited for her to turn around. She was on the phone with a woman, talking about how much her granddaughters attempted suicide affected _her_.

"…I took everything she could do it with out of the house and tossed down the garbage chute while she cleaned up, I just couldn't TAKE another one of her episodes, and frankly she's just not trustworthy." My heart sank. The belts, the scarves, the sheets, and all of the knives and _forks_ in the kitchen were gone. Every pill in the house was locked in Corinna's room. Except, I noticed, the morphine prescription I got from the hospital. It was sitting not three feet from her left hand and a glass of water. Typical.

I decided to do it that night. At some point, the first opportunity I had, I would run. She couldn't chase me, she's too old and would probably be too doped up on _my_ morphine. But how? There's no way she would leave me alone anywhere.

She interrupted my thoughts of running away with her shrill voice.

"I need to go to the grocery store today. We're having a 'glad you survived party' tonight. I'm getting cake-" she paused, "but you shouldn't have too much." She said with a condescending look on her face. She looked down at my thighs, which were bigger than the average nineteen year old, but I worked out a lot. Basically all I did in my room was squats and doodle on scrap paper. In her mind, women should be thin and weak, and always depend on a man to do everything for them.

She wasn't always like this. Before my grandfather Abraham died, she Corinna was the picture perfect homemaker with southern roots. She would tell me bedtime stories about her childhood. She rode horses, was courted by handsome and wealthy men, and ran away from home when she was eighteen to be with my grandfather, who her family didn't approve of. He drank and smoked and gambled their lives away. Eventually Corinna had two children, and they had nothing. She has always been a very prideful woman, and the financial state they were in for the majority of her adult life was abysmal. What finally broke her was the death of her first daughter, my mom, Kristen. My biological father would be gone for days and gamble and drink just like my grandfather had done. She wasn't going to spend the rest of her life with a man who was just like her father. Eventually he got in bad with the mob and they started threatening us. They would leave fingers in our mailbox, and eventually my mom tried to leave. Earlier that day she dropped me off with Grandmother Corinna, just to make sure I would be safe in case he got violent with her. He stabbed her thirty seven times, and then took his own life.

After that, my grandfather went downhill medically. He would constantly complain about chest pains, and two weeks after my mom's funeral he dropped dead in the kitchen getting a beer. My grandmother found him later that day when she got home from shopping and picking me up from school. She had always been a careless woman, not accounting for other people's feelings. When my mother died she became stoic, and then after the death of her husband, she became a real maniac.

 _Chaos is like gravity, all it takes is one little push._

And it sent her over the edge. She became hot-headed, mean, and spiteful. She had a vendetta. She had deaths to avenge, and she did so by making everyone else around her miserable. She worked her warped wheels of justice, and hated everything that reminded her of my mother or grandfather. I've been told that I'm a lot like my mother, and for that, I was to be punished. She tried to beat it out of me, burn it out of me with her Virginia slim cigarettes, break me mentally, and scar me physically. Little did she know all of these things pushed my closer to my mother. I was strong like her, mean like her, smart like her, cunning like her, and most of all, I saw the world just as she did. It was a beautiful tribute and a sad excuse for a reunion.

"I need to go to the store, and now that you don't have anything in here to _hurt yourself_ with, I'm going to leave you here." She turned to look at me, and scared me out of my deep thought. Her hair was greyer than before, faded from her usual permed raven hair. Her wrinkles are like canyons, carved by years and years of river like tears. She was the shell of a person standing before me, and the best of her had left. The remaining woman that stood before me was comparable to the Gotham city criminals that we saw on TV every night. She was cruel, torturous, keen on revenge, and over the years, became a sucker for seeing others in pain. It's like it gave her a strange internal calm. Like her storm ceased when violence was in front of her. Maybe that's why she loved to watch the news so often. The Mob was always killing someone, the Joker was always robbing someone and killing _several_ someone's. The uproar was her life force. The chaos, the very breath she breathed. Part of me couldn't blame her for becoming who she was. I can't say I'd be completely sane if I had been thrown into her circumstances.

You would think, though, that you could have some sort of control over what kind of person you become, even in the face of tragedy. Monsters are always inside us, but they only become who we are if we let them.

"Don't worry about locking the door behind me, I put a deadbolt on the outside." And with that and a wink, she left. Little did she know that would be one of the last times I saw her.

. . .

The door was no use, and it had been only fifteen minutes since she left. She would be back within another fifteen. I looked around and shoved the last thing in my backpack, something I almost forgot. A small black leather book with a moonstone on each corner, and in the middle it read _"Sybil"_ in fancy lettering. My mother got this foe me on my fourteenth birthday, and it was the last gift she ever gave me. I wrote her letters in that book. It wasn't a traditional diary, but it was the closes thing I had. Every time I would feel sad I would write to her, hoping with all my being that it would somehow get to her.

I was fully packed, including some protein bars and bottled water. I only had two extra outfits and the kicks I was wearing. That would have to be enough. I still didn't have a way out, so I scrambled around trying desperately to find a key or a hanger to undo the deadbolt from the outside. That's when I saw the window. There was a fire escape. I threw open the curtains, and in the cloud of dust that followed, I saw that there was no lock on the window. I threw it open fairly easily and stuck my head out onto the black grate platform.

My heart sank as I realized there were no stairs leading down. Tears started to form in my eyes as I thought I would never be able to leave. I climbed all the way out and shut the window, just the way it had been before. The stairs to the roof were my only option. I looked around for my grandmother's car, and when it was clear to climb, I did.

The roof was large and sprinkled with cooling fans throughout the grey, seemingly never ending landscape. Gotham city was large, and so the buildings were built in such a way that they were never too far away from each other. I crept closer to the edge of the roof, afraid that I would be seen or heard. Heights scared me. I could stay on this roof forever, but they would come looking for me eventually. Corinna would never expect me to roof jump, so I had to do it to get away. I spend ten seconds assuring myself that it was only a three feet jump, and then took the leap. I fell for what seemed like forever before I hit the grey concrete of the neighboring building.

"This is so much fun!" I said with my hands in the air, but I flinched, realizing I had yelled it out loud. I took no time to rest as I jumped buildings, three feet at a time. After eighteen buildings, two close calls, and having to jump upwards three feet to meet a building, I decided to take a break near the edge of the roof of my current building. I pulled out a protein bar and counted the rest of them. Five. How was I going to live off of five little bars of food? Whatever I had to do to get food was better than living there. At nineteen, the most noteworthy thing I had done so far was, well, run away from home. "Home". Bullshit. That was never my home. Corinna made my life a living hell from the time I stepped foot there. The second my mother died she made it her mission to hurt everyone around her in an attempt to punish life itself for taking people away from her. People she didn't even value in the first place.

The sun started to descend into the horizon, and the sky was graced with deep hues of purple and pink. I laid my backpack on the ground so that I would have a makeshift pillow, and I pulled my jacket off to use as a blanket. I pulled out my book and started to re-read the letters I wrote to my mom. Something she told me rang in the back of my mind.

 _"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people."_

Before my mom dropped out of college, she was a psychology major. Carl Jung was one of her favorite.

My eyes slowly acclimate to the darkness and I slowly sip a bottle of water while enjoying my new-found freedom. The breeze was just enough to cool me off but not make me cold. I snuggle up in my jacket for comfort, not warmth. I drift away into a dreamless sleep.

What seems like five seconds later I awoke to the sound of a heavy metal door slamming. I could hear feet shuffle and smell menthol cigarettes. There was the sound of a radio, and then a light whisper.

"Yeah, it's all clear boss, courtyard is dead." I slowly peered over the edge to see a very large man dressed in a snazzy black suit. Despite his obvious physical strength, he looked worried.

"Goo _d_ ," the man on the other end spoke slowly and confidently. For some reason, that voice sounded…-

The sound of someone's foot hitting the metal door shattered through the entire block. I expected people to wake up and shout through their windows at whoever was down there. That's when I realized I wasn't surrounded by apartments anymore, I was in the industrial district of Gotham. I was, in fact, standing on an old abandoned warehouse. I curiously peeked over the edge of the roof in the other direction to see boarded windows and graffiti. Aside from the obvious fact that people were coming out of it, anyone would think it was a normal abandoned warehouse.

The voice that next hit my ears made me freeze, grow cold, and heart race halfway with excitement.

"Take NOTE boys-ah!" I creeped my head over the ledge of the roof to get a look at who was speaking and what was going on. The Joker. _The_ Joker. He was dressed in a long purple overcoat. His purple pants and dress shirt were a little lighter than his coat, though they matched each other. His black shoes were decorated in blood, and left a toe print of his left shoe everywhere he stepped. His arms were flailing about in a way that let everyone else know he was in charge.

"THIS is what, uh, happens" He eyed the men one by one, his glare destroying any sense of security any of the men even dared to have. "When you DON'T do your fucking job. Ah, right boys?" Everyone nodded in sync, and another man brought out one of the Jokers men. He was tied up with a gag in his mouth, and looked like he had already had a severe beating. This congregation the Joker put on was just to send a message to his men.

" _You…_ " The Joker trailed off and no one dared interrupt him or look him in the eye. He was like a rabid dog, looking him in the eye was a challenge, and he would win. " _single handedly_ ah, got me put in that _hell hole."_

That's right, The Joker was in Arkham for a little over six months during his most recent stent. He waved his arms around with a knife in hand making sure this man knew exactly what was happening before he met his end. Suddenly, like lightning, the Joker punched his former employee in the jaw, and a loud crack echoed the walls.

I gasped and moved my hand up to my mouth. I knew what that kind of hit felt like and it was shocking and exciting to see someone else be the object of violence and mental torture. Everything moved in slow motion, and in the process of bringing my hand to my face I nudged a nail and it teetered over the edge. It was falling for what seemed like an eternity before it hit the ground with a metallic cling.

I froze and my blood ran cold. One by one all of the men gathered around the joker and his punching bag turned their heads slowly. I was frozen and I couldn't move. The Joker was the last one to turn his head, and when he did he let out a laugh, the likes of which I will never forget as long as I live.

It was as if a lion met the next sheep for slaughter.

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